National Geographic Backyard Guide to Edible Wild Plants (National Geographic Backyard Guides)

Collect more than 100 delicious edible plants directly from your own garden with this useful, engaging, and beautifully illustrated guide.

Nature lovers, gardeners, and cooking enthusiasts can turn their backyard into a food source with tips for identifying wild plants, recommendations for both beginners and experienced foragers, and more than 600 ideas and recipes to bring the wild into the kitchen.

Following the successful line of natural guides from National Geographic, National Geographic Backyard Guide to Edible Wild Plants is a colorful and engaging manual on 102 common wild plants that can be foraged to prepare delicious foods and beverages. From sunflowers to spicy wild mustard and seductive wild grapes, this book identifies a wide variety of flavors and textures that even novice foragers can learn to harvest with care, safety, and sustainability.

From there, the creative possibilities are abundant, including instructions for preparing:

• elderberry jam
• lamb's quarter salad
• Jerusalem artichoke soup
• sassafras tea
• wild carrot pie
• homemade garden cider

This guide is divided into seven sections based on the most relevant parts of the plant for foragers: roots, leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, shoots, as well as the "backyard stars": a dozen plants that are common, easy to identify, and abundant in culinary possibilities.

Each plant is photographed, illustrated to aid learning, and described in detail, including hundreds of preparation tips and recipes, thanks to authors Mimi Prunella Hernandez and Heather Wood Buzzard, who bring botanical expertise and culinary creativity to each entry.

Highlighted Features

• 102 common edible wild plants, illustrated and described
• More than 600 culinary ideas and recipes
• Safety and sustainability tips for foraging
• Organization by useful plant parts
• Ideal guide for naturalists, gardeners, and curious cooks